Dear
Well April was a swine of a month, don't you think ? (excuse the pun). Starting out with multiple power outages in the Sydney CBD, progressing to a global Swine Flu outbreak, business continuity discussions hit executive team agendas faster than they could shout
"turn the power back on, there's a pandemic on its way!!", and was accompanied by sudden interest in continuity plan development and testing.
I hope you weren't affected? We heard of several companies that had their own, and customer, business functions impacted.
Case studies are creating some very interesting reading. IT teams fumbling in dark data centres randomly shutting down computer systems before 1-hour standby battery systems were due to fail, contact centre staff bombarded with dozens of voicemail messages on their mobile phones, people climbing out of the top of lifts after being trapped for hours, and general chaos and confusion around the clarity of roles and responsibilities during an outage, and communications strategies (by the way, have you thought about who you'd call first?).
Some of those organisations affected invoked components of their continuity plans, those without one were less fortunate. We heard that one services company lost its longest-standing client, which valued at tens of thousands of dollars in revenu a month. Others used crisis communications plans and failover procedures to inform customers they were relocating to their backup site and that "for us, its business as usual".
We'll continue to collect stories and case studies and will include them in future editions of this newsletter as well as on our website. If you have a story of your own, good or bad,
I'd love to hear from you.And if you're concerned about recent events, in this edition you'll find a couple of checklists below to arm you with valubale questions to determine the health of your continuity plan and related infrastructure.
Enjoy this edition; here's hoping for an incident-free month of May.
Warm regards
Rod Crowder
Ph: 1300-BCPLAN / +612 8251 0080
Mb: 0412 337 677
[email protected]